JANUARY FORECAST ISSUES CONTINUE!!!

This January forecast nonsense has persisted for over a month now without a proper resolution. What the hell is going on over at WU? If you're not going to maintain your service or respond to support issues then have some decency and stop charging for your busted service. Consumer affairs in most countries would have a field day with the supposed service you are charging for.

Helllloo is anybody there, Have admins gone on holidays? Paying $600US a month on my end and you can’t even get support. Where is the money going, IBMs piggybank? If you’re a small team, then either hire some new support staff or stop charging for an unsupported service. I work with my users when they complain about a January forecast, and I’m one person. Why don’t you get your act together and work with yours.

Roughly 50% of requests I send to the WU API /forecast10day endpoint return forecast dates that are from January. This data is a critical part of my app, thats why I pay good money to WU to provide it. I make roughly 30,000-50,000 API requests per day, 50% of them return the incorrect date. The level of frustration is mindblowing, the mountains of support emails, the negative reviews, the uninstalls. Im trying to stem the tide here while my app goes down the toilet.

We are talking to ourselves at this point it seems. Timothy, i'm sure Aeris has a great service, but I have an app that is live now with data provided by WU. Replacing the WU API would require a substantial amount of work with possible UI changes that many users might not appreciate. Plus, I would still need to support users who do not update to the latest version of the app.

At this point, I might not have a choice, but it would be great if WU just fixed the issues with their broken service rather than me rewriting large portions of my app.

I see, I’m having this exact same issue. We thought it was a bug in our end for a while but this confirms that it’s an issue at WU. Out data shows this has been happening for at least 6 months as well. We’ve been using the api for years but this is unacceptable.

It's been a problem for a while, even wrote some code to validate the response and I've been dealing with it. In the last few days the number of invalid responses has skyrocketed, 50% or more without actually counting occurrences in the log.

This is a little side project and until now has been pretty rock solid. But now I'm doing damage control and allocating time I don't have to use a different API and move away from what now appears to be an unsupported service. Sad what they let it become.

This issue started a few days ago for us. I assumed it was on our end so I have spent all morning working to resolve it. I should have come here first. I have had to turn our weather feed off. We would appreciate a resolution to this issue!

In my logs, around 19-Jun-2018 19:45 UTC time, the January issue looks to have been resolved. I appreciate your help in getting this fixed as the anxiety of dealing with a broken app and losing users has been lifted for now. However, I wont be removing the bandaid code that I wrote to mitigate the issue just yet.

What I cant understand is how this issue was able to persist for so long. If you have an API product which you are charging customers for, the first thing they expect is reliability. When your API fails, your customers products fail.

Its reasonable to assume things will go down from time to time. How a company deals with these problems is a good indication of the commitment to their service and customers.

Calsy, Unfortunately we have a pretty skeleton crew here these days. The issue was caused by very poorly written code, convoluted architecture, and the departure of the people who wrote it. We're working to fix these issues, but 20 years of technical debt can't be unwound in a short time. In the meantime you might want to chat with the folks at TWC to see if they can help you migrate to our enterprise API solution.

I appreciate your candid reply. Im not sure about other people on the forum, but personally i'm not aware of the internal issues occurring at WU. From outward appearances its business as usual as the site and API portal remain the same, am I missing something?

What you mention would be a concern for any WU customers. Describing the current state of service, Its more likely then not that another issue will arise soon and when it does who knows how long the service will be out.

Shouldn't WU be frank with its customers about the current state of the company? Maybe an email to everyone using your service, it would at least give them time to prepare for a migration to another service. You could offer incentives like a discount of a month or 2 free to trial TWC and get people to starting moving. All this secrecy is not going to do WU or IBM any favours.